Simply Convivial: Organization & Mindset for Home & Homeschool

Season 10: Classical Thoughts on Why We Teach Education in the broad, unspecialized sense is summed up as how to obey and how to rule. One who rules without obeying is a tyrant, one who obeys without ruling is a slave. And both truly all begins when young children learn to obey, because that requires the beginnings of learning self-control. Sometimes it’s easy to sigh on a Tuesday morning and think, “What am I doing? What is the point anyway?” Isocrates reminds us of the point – or, at least, one point. Education creates society, for good or ill. Read the original posts: * Practicing Early Home Education – Plato * What’s Education Good For? Listen: Find all posts (so far) in the Great Tradition series: Simple Sanity Saver: Teaching Shakespeare Shakespeare was meant to be seen. How many movie scripts make it into lit class? Not many at all; that Shakespeare does demonstrates his genius.Which would you prefer? Reading a movie script or watching the movie made from it? Of course we’d rather watch the movie because the movie is the point of the script. In the same way, Shakespeare was meant to be acted and interpreted. I absolutely love to watch multiple versions of a play and see how differences of inflection, of setting, and of context put completely different spins on the lines. This is the beauty of Shakespeare. None of them are “Right” (although some can be Wrong). Scripts allow actors room to interpret their characters and get into character, reflecting different facets of humanity as they do so. Is Hamlet’s ghost to be trusted? How that ghost is portrayed will affect how you feel about that central plot point. Shakespeare’s plays and themes are complex, as life and people are. Always preview movies. Of course you, as the parent, should always watch a Shakespeare production yourself before viewing it with your children. You know your children and your standards, so you need to preview movie options in light of those. Violence, bawdiness, even nudity are all issues in many Shakespeare videos, and there are also many that make Shakespeare feel dull and confusing. You’re going for an experience that will leave your children with a positive enjoyment of Shakespeare, so watch the movie options beforehand and try to find ones that will be a good fit for your family. There are a number of movie versions that I enjoy that I wouldn’t let my kids watch, but there are some we’ve watched as a family. Your mileage, of course, may vary. I’m not promising you or yours will like them. If you can’t find a movie you can endorse in its entirety, sometimes you can watch brief clips on YouTube. Something is better than nothing: the kids need to see that Shakespeare was written to be done and not just endured. Check for live productions. Movies are not actually the only way to watch Shakespeare performed. Before film, there was still theater. As an added bonus, many school or local groups will refrain from excessive violence or lewdness in their plays, at least in our town. High schools, local theaters, and area acting companies are all likely places to find the occasional Shakespeare play. I have sometimes chosen the play we read in school based on what will be performed locally. Ask around and see if there are groups you don’t know about yet. Spread the word! Leaving a review on iTunes will help other homeschooling moms discover t...

Season 10: Planner Pep Talks The episodes in season 10 are excerpted from a live workshop I gave in February 2018 about how to make sure your planner and planning is not a waste of time. Hint: it’s more about us than about the planner. Get access to the whole workshop, the chat replay, and more here: So, we go through these different seasons where we’re using time differently, we need to think about time differently, and put together the plan in a way that matches how our life is flowing. So, if you have a baby, or if you have primarily toddlers, then the way that your time flows, the way your day flows, is unique and it’s a thing. So, don’t try to fit your life into a planner, fit the planner to your life. So, maybe your time chunks are morning and afternoon, and that’s it. Still, you get three things per time block, and if you hit those things you’re good. And the things can’t be “clean the whole house” – that’s not one thing! We have to evaluate our expectations and what’s realistic. “Clean a drawer” is one thing. So, the important thing is looking at how your day flows and putting together a planner that reflects that is tricky, but thinking about it in that way, I think, helps us see other possibilities rather than just trying to print off (even mine, including mine) someone else’s planner template and then just trying to paste that into our life. But, to look at all the different templates that are out there and then say, “I like this about that one, I like this about this one” and try a few and maybe, for your interval, where you have six weeks of focus on certain projects – maybe a project for an interval is to figure out a planner that works for me. And, so each week you can try out a new thing. But, you’ve got to give it at least a week before you know whether or not it’s working for you. And, you also, as you evaluate have to honestly evaluate is the planner not working for me because it doesn’t match the way my life flows or the categories that my brain thinks in, is it not working for that reason, or is it not working because I wasn’t looking at it, because I wasn’t working the plan myself. Was the problem the planner or was the problem me? And, going through and just honestly doing that evaluation, it’s not the sort of condemnation, sort of thing, like if the problem is you (because sometimes it is, sometimes it’s me – a lot of the times it’s me) and when you realize that, it’s not a guilt-fest, it’s a well-what’s-getting-in-the-way? Is it my attitude? Is it my habits? And, how can I change my attitude? And, how can I change my habits, because those are things that we do have control over and we can change. And, just being aware and trying things out and being intentional is the first step, because that’s when we notice what’s going on in our heads, it’s when we notice what our habits are, and that’s really the first step – is paying attention and noticing.

Season 10: Classical Thoughts on Why We Teach Mothers must be both teachers and learners. As mothers home with our children all day every day, we are their primary influence, especially in the younger years. We can’t just wing it and expect great results or satisfaction. If we can be always learning, always growing, always stretching, we will be happier and we will be modeling for our children the life we’re asking them to embrace. Education is about how we treat others and comes by imitation. Read the original posts: * What makes a good teacher? – Plato * Portrait of a Graduate – Isocrates Listen: Find all posts (so far) in the Great Tradition series: Simple Sanity Saver: Teaching Shakespeare Familiarity breeds affection, not contempt. Ken Ludwig, author of How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare, writes: Having thought about Shakespeare for most of my life, I have concluded that the best way to learn about his plays, his language, his themes and his stories with any real depth and integrity is to memorize a few passages from his plays so that you have them at your fingertips. Memorization doesn’t have to be an ordeal. During the weeks you watch and read the play, simply repeat the lines you’ve chosen for memory. I print the selections in large font, with the phrases broken up and each on their own line – plenty of white space makes it easier to follow and easier to see in the mind’s-eye for recall. Then before we read or watch or talk about the play, we repeat each selection 2-3 times, all together. Easy. Simple. It really works. Spread the word! Leaving a review on iTunes will help other homeschooling moms discover this podcast!

Season 10: Planner Pep Talks The episodes in season 10 are excerpted from a live workshop I gave in February 2018 about how to make sure your planner and planning is not a waste of time. Hint: it’s more about us than about the planner. Get access to the whole workshop, the chat replay, and more here: It’s a way to realistically evaluate what’s going on in your life and what you need to be doing and what you are doing and what you should be doing, because the potential of what we could do is great. And, maybe if you have your mind wrapped around what you are doing, you find that there is room for me, there is room for that creative project, there’s room for this or that, or sometimes you evaluate where you are and you think, ‘Oh, that’s why I feel crazy because I feel like I’ve got all these things going on and now I need to look through and maybe cut some things,’ so the planner is really a tool of evaluation and a tool of focus, but we are still the ones doing the work. The planner’s not going to do any of the work for us, and the planner’s not going to make it easier to do the work either, it’s just going to make what the work is clearer, but writing things down is huge, and I think that’s the real power for having a planner sheet is just that it is written down and out of your head, because when we try to keep all the details in our head that’s where we’re bound to go crazy and feel like we can’t key above, we can’t juggle it all, and a lot of times the problem is just that all the details are in our heads and so we can’t use our heads for thinking or creative problem solutions or even doing the work because our heads are so full of just trying to keep track of the details, so we need to use the paper for what it’s good for, which is keeping track of the details and then our heads for what they are good for, which is thinking things through, coming up with solutions and maybe moving us forward. Keeping things on paper or outside of your head at least so you don’t have to keep track of everything.

Season 10: Classical Thoughts on Why We Teach If we start off on this homeschool journey with no idea what education is, why we’re doing it, or where we want to be at the end, we’ll flounder, frustrated and fickle. We’ll have no idea whether what we’re doing is working or if we’re doing a good job. We have to have a measuring stick to determine if we’re straightened out and moving forward. A measuring stick has a beginning and an end. To teach, we have to pay attention to where we are leading and to who we are leading. Read the original posts: * A Teacher Must Pay Attention * We Need to Know What We’re After – Xenophon Listen: Find all posts (so far) in the Great Tradition series: Simple Sanity Saver: Teaching Shakespeare The first step is to do basically a Cliff’s-Notes version of the play. When the plot and the story line are known beforehand, then our attention is free to enjoy the details without having to keep track of who is who. But we also don’t want the introduction to introduce the idea that Shakespeare is dull. A plain enumeration of the characters and salient plot points makes for a boring introduction and a bad starting point. So introduce the play with an engaging retelling. Spread the word! Leaving a review on Apple Podcasts will help other homeschooling moms discover this podcast!

Season 10: Planner Pep Talks The episodes in season 10 are excerpted from a live workshop I gave in February 2018 about how to make sure your planner and planning is not a waste of time. Hint: it’s more about us than about the planner. Get access to the whole workshop, the chat replay, and more here: Partial Transcript: So, our planning system and our planner in particular is something that we do have to come back and revisit and reiterate, put together again. That’s not a waste of time. If we’re coming back at it regularly but not re-making the entire plan everyday (I’ve done that, it is a waste of time), it’s productive procrastination. Procrastination that feels productive: “my life is entirely falling apart, I don’t even know what to do next, I’m just going to make a new planner page (because that’ll help) and honestly, it often does feel like if I just get this planner thing right, everything will fall into place.” That’s not actually the way it works. We’ve got a road — the productivity road, the road of doing what we’re supposed to be doing when we’re supposed to be doing it. There’s a ditch on one side of the road that says “I don’t feel like I’m going as fast as I want to or I don’t know if I’m on the right road and so I’m going to re-do my planner even though I made one yesterday.” That sort of re-upping, re-evaluating too soon where you haven’t actually had time to work the plan; there’s not time to have experience in the planner and figure out what’s working, what’s not working, and why. And so, the solution we come up with as our creativity outlet is coming up with a new planner page. There are better creative outlets and more refreshing ones than that. So, we don’t want to re-create our planner pages at the drop of a hat just because one thing didn’t go well today or because we actually don’t want to do the plan, making a new planner page is not going to make us want to do the plan. But, sometimes that’s the reason why we choose a planner, or we try to re-do it, or we buy a new planner. We look to the planner to change, basically to change our hearts, and it’s not going to do it. And, then the ditch on the other side of the road is to just throw off all planning altogether and say, “Well, I have wasted time, the planner didn’t work for me today, or this whole week, or this whole month, and so I must not be a planner. This doesn’t work for me so I’m not going to do any.” That is a ditch on the side of the road; being organized, being productive doesn’t mean that you have to be a driven type, a super fast, high energy kind of person. Planning, keeping a planner, trying to be organized is just about trying to be prepared for the service and responsibilities that God has given you and it’s about thinking through what those responsibilities are because so much of the time our minds are filled with ‘ought to’s’ that aren’t necessarily ‘ought to’s’ – maybe they’re can’s, I might be able to do this, or maybe I should do this, but I think that we, too often, feel obligated to do things that we shouldn’t necessarily feel obligated to do. So, the process of planning is distilling what are my responsibilities and where should my focus be, so that when those different ideas, details, possibilities, come at you, you can legitimately and without too much decision-fatigue, or a gut-wrenching pro’s and con’s list just say, “Not room for that” or “That’s not part of my priorities right now,” and it helps make that decision on yes, I can do that, no I can’t do that.

Season 10: Classical Thoughts on Why We Teach The one thread that strings through all the classical educators from Perrin to Plato is that education’s aim is virtue – not a diploma, not a job, not a stack of accomplishments. Our children – and even ourselves – should be better people, inherently, because of the education we received, no matter what circumstances or results come afterward. Education is for the soul. Read the original post: The reason for education Listen: Find all posts (so far) in the Great Tradition series: Simple Sanity Saver: Teaching Shakespeare Shakespeare can be an intimidating subject to introduce. Isn’t the language archaic and the doesn’t high quality mean high difficulty? Actually, the language isn’t that difficult when it’s read (that is, interpreted) by an experienced reader. The profound themes within plots were created not as pure art, but also to entertain the masses. Shakespeare was the hot movie in his day, and he can still be enjoyed that way today. You don’t have to wait for high school to do Shakespeare with your kids, and you don’t need to be homeschooling to study Shakespeare together. If you do any reading aloud or movie watching together, you can do Shakespeare together. Shakespeare was written in order to be seen, scripted in order to be performed. Shakespeare wrote popular entertainment, not philosophical treatise. We can draw out deep themes and discuss grand philosophy using monologues and plots we find in Shakespeare, but we should never study Shakespeare to the exclusion of simply enjoying the fun of Shakespeare – Shakespeare was meant to be fun. I believe that Shakespeare, the greatest artist whose medium was the English language, can and should be introduced to children. The deep discussions about betrayal, cowardice, truth, love, and piety can wait for high school, but the enjoyment of the plots, the characters, and the language doesn’t have to wait. Introducing children to the world of the plays will help them feel more at home and navigate those deeper waters later in a more knowledgeable and understanding way, because they’ll already know the lay of the land. Spread the word! Leaving a review on iTunes will help other homeschooling moms discover this podcast!

Season 10: Planner Pep Talks The episodes in season 10 are excerpted from a live workshop I gave in February 2018 about how to make sure your planner and planning is not a waste of time. Hint: it’s more about us than about the planner. Get access to the whole workshop, the chat replay, and more here: There are all kinds of ways to do planning, to have a planner, to use a planner. Different things will work for different people and different things will work for the same person at different times. So, we’re going to share some ideas and try to help each other to figure out what is working and what isn’t working with our planning system. The key to having a planner that works is being able to customize it to what we need. How many times have you tried to use someone else’s planner and had the boxes or the question not work for you? You thought that this format that worked for other people, that someone really smart put together, should work and if it didn’t, the problem was probably you. Other people’s planners for sale have questions, boxes to fill in, menu plan sections – you start filling it in and you feel like you spend way too much time planning, or it’s just not the right fit, it just doesn’t click. It feels like a waste of time, and who wants to waste time? Not all planning time is a good use of time. We can waste our time planning. But, if we start going into that pattern of thinking where we say that all planning, or any time spent planning is a waste of time, or any planner is a waste of time, then we can guarantee they won’t work for us. We won’t use our planner in a good way because we’re coming at it with a bad attitude. So, we’re going to look at planning and the different ways to go about it, to make sure our planning is not a waste of time.

Season 9: Real Life Homeschooling Tips This episode is an excerpt from a video workshop Mystie recorded with Celeste Cruz in 2016. You can register for the entire replay, with bonus support material, by clicking the button below. Listen: Mystie, homeschooling mother of 5, loves to take big ideas and grand visions and make them practicable in real life. So she blogs about organizing attitudes & systems at Simplified Organization and about classical homeschooling at Simply Convivial. Celeste is a Charlotte Mason homeschooling mother with 8 children 10-and-under (at the time of this recording – now 9). When she has free hands, she enjoys distance running, nature journaling, beach days, reading, and writing about home education at Joyous Lessons. You can also find Celeste on Instagram: both at her own account (@celeste_cruz) and as a part of the Charlotte Mason IRL community (@charlottemasonirl). Spread the word! Leaving a review on iTunes will help other homeschooling moms discover this podcast!

Season 9: Quick Ways to Organize Your Attitude If there’s one thing that derails our attitudes, it’s feeling overwhelmed and uncertain about what we should actually be doing. There are so many options, so many opportunities. We simply must say no at times, but how can we know when we should say no and when we need to be stretched by saying yes? The answer lies in our vocations. Our vocations are made up of the big responsibilities we’re given. Read the original post here: Know Your Vocations

Season 9: Real Life Homeschooling Tips This episode is an excerpt from a video workshop Mystie recorded with Celeste Cruz in 2016. You can register for the entire replay, with bonus support material, by clicking the button below. Listen: Mystie, homeschooling mother of 5, loves to take big ideas and grand visions and make them practicable in real life. So she blogs about organizing attitudes & systems at Simplified Organization and about classical homeschooling at Simply Convivial. Celeste is a Charlotte Mason homeschooling mother with 8 children 10-and-under (at the time of this recording – now 9). When she has free hands, she enjoys distance running, nature journaling, beach days, reading, and writing about home education at Joyous Lessons. You can also find Celeste on Instagram: both at her own account (@celeste_cruz) and as a part of the Charlotte Mason IRL community (@charlottemasonirl). excerpted transcript Mystie – There’s a spread of abilities and also needs. How do the expectations that we have as moms going into that situation affect how we do it, what we do, and our sanity as we do it. So, how would you say that your expectations have maybe changed or when you go into a school year. Celeste – Since I’ve always had little kids while I’m schooling, usually a toddler and a baby, pretty much every year since I started homeschooling,.. I have a certain curriculum, a certain amount of work that I’d like to get done with my big kids but I have to be flexible in terms of where and how we fit in those things, and I have to be willing to think outside of the box in terms of our school day… Mystie – When there’s so many interruptions and you have to get up and take care of the baby, there are just a lot of things all going on at once, and you’re trying to decide do I do [this] or [this]. How do you keep track of what you should be doing or what you need to get back to when the interruption calms down? Celeste – I think of my day really in terms of blocks. At the beginning of each year I set out a schedule for myself where I have time slots and that is not actually something that we’re going to live by, that’s me making sure I’m not over-scheduling myself, that technically these things could potentially fit in this order on a given day that might or might not actually occur… Spread the word! Leaving a review on iTunes will help other homeschooling moms discover this podcast!

Season 9: Quick Ways to Organize Your Attitude Anxiety and worry are attitudes we need to rid ourselves of. Peace and joy (among others) are the fruits of the Holy Spirit, the attitudes of Christ we are to put on. God’s peace, by the Holy Spirit, guards our hearts, changes our attitudes, when we pray with thanksgiving. Having peace and joy is not something we must do on our own before we present our requests, but something we ask for with thanksgiving and in the moment – all the moments, the many moments – we need it. But prayer is also something we can weave into everything we do, as 1 Thessalonians tells us, “pray without ceasing.” Read the original post here: Pause to Pray

Season 9: Real Life Homeschooling Tips This episode is an excerpt of an hour-long live video chat between Amy Roberts and Mystie Winckler in 2016. Listen: Mystie and Amy chat about reactive v. responsive planning, communicating plans with children, teaching kids time management, and what to do when life feels like a series of fires to put out.

Season 9: Quick Ways to Organize Your Attitude But we also need bite-sized truths to meditate, not just general reading. To meditate means to deliberate over, to ponder, to consider, to mull over. We can’t really mull over chapters upon chapters at a time. We need to give ourselves little segments to sink down deep, little bit by little bit. Over a lifetime, it creates a deep well. In order to meditate on truth, we have to know truth. We have to be filling our minds with truth. Read the original post here: Meditate on truth.

Season 9: Real Life Homeschooling Tips This episode is an excerpt from a video workshop Mystie recorded with Amy Roberts in 2016. You can register for the entire replay, with bonus support material, by clicking the button below. Amy Roberts is the mother of 10, who has children from 20 to 2 years old. She and her husband have homeschooled from the beginning and shares what she’s learned and how she does it. * Amy’s blog, Raising Arrows * Amy’s Instagram, Amy Raising Arrows * Large Family Homeschooling eBook * Schedules for Homeschooling Year Round Listen: This is a partial transcript of the episode. Mystie: So in your large family how do you group your kids for instruction time? Amy: I have natural sections of kids. There is almost a four year gap between what I call my “big kids” and “middle kids” and then there’s a gap between my “middle kids” and “small kids” because we lost a daughter eight years ago. So there’s a natural gap. I always start with my littles. I get my big kids started with their individual work which is pretty auto-pilot for them. My two oldest don’t require much from me at all anymore. My middles still require some instruction, but they have things like handwriting and copyworb they can do without me. I’ve said this a million times on the blog: it does not take as long as you think it does to teach little people. It takes 30 minutes. That’s it. Mystie: So true! Until they’re about eight, we do a little phonics and a little math. But not even every day for those early years. If they’re resistant or stubborn, it’s better at those younger ages to have them on board when you are working with them rather than push them or turn school into a fight. We want school to be this thing we do together. We need to pay attention to the atmosphere and dynamic that we’re having together and if that gets off track it’s better to just not do anything than to get into the habit of fighting over it in the morning. Amy: I want my kids to love learning, and I want them to see it as a lifelong thing, so there are always lots of toys and hands-on things that they can be doing. The can be outside exploring and you’re doing science. I want them to love learning. Mystie: And you’re only doing 30 minutes a day with your 5 & 7 year olds? Amy: That’s right! That’s all it takes. The rest of the time is exploring outside, talking about things, reading books. I don’t count readalouds as school work. I’m talking 30 minutes seat work. That’s all those little people can handle. Spread the word! Leaving a review on iTunes will help other homeschooling moms discover this podcast!